The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - I Tested ChatGPT As My Cofounder for a Week - Here's Everything I Learned

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, I use ChatGPT Pulse as a startup co-founder for a week, and here's what happened. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Super Intelligent, Robots and Pencils, Notion and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, you can go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can now subscribe directly on Apple Podcasts.

Starting point is 00:00:33 It's the same price, three bucks a month. Spotify will be coming soon when I figure out a couple of technical difficulties. For sponsor and speaking opportunities, go to AIDDailyBreef.A.I. All that information is there as well. And with that, let's get into today's episode. This is kind of a big, fun review show, perfect for a weekend big thing, where I look at three of the products that have come out this week, ChatsyPT Pulse, Sora 2, and Imagine from Claude,

Starting point is 00:00:55 and talk about how they did and which have the biggest implications for the future. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are actually grading not one, but three different products that have come out this week. We're looking at ChatGPt Pulse, SORA 2, and the wildly overshadowed, but potentially most significant of all, Imagine from Claude. With both Imagine and Sora, it's going to be a little bit more impressionistic, but with ChatGBT.BT Pulse, I had a very specific goal in mind when I wanted to look into it. So for those of you who don't remember the announcement, chat Chb T. Pulse is basically a daily curated newsletter for you made based on your previous

Starting point is 00:01:28 chats. That comes up every morning with a set of potentially ephemeral articles that you can add to your general chats and engage with just like you would any other chat on chat GPT. When it was announced, Sam Altman tweeted, today we're launching my favorite feature of chat GPT so far called Pulse. It is initially available to pro subscribers. Pulse works for you overnight and keeps thinking about your interests, your connected data, your recent chats, and more. Every morning you get a custom generated set of stuff you might be interested in. It performs super well if you tell chatchipT more about what's important to you. Think of treating chatchipt like a super competent personal assistant. Sometimes you ask for things.

Starting point is 00:02:03 things you need in the moment, but if you share general preferences, it will do a good job for you proactively. And this is really the key question, how valuable it is, how much people want, a shift from reactive to proactive. For his part, Sam says, this all points to what I believe is the future of chat GPT, a shift from being all reactive to being significantly proactive. New CEO of applications, Fiji Simo said something similar. In her pulse announcement post, she wrote, AI should do more than just answer questions. It should anticipate your needs and help you reach your goals. She even called her blog post about it a new paradigm of proactive, steerable AI. And she basically says that this is an agent that becomes more like a human assistant. Explaining more, she writes,

Starting point is 00:02:43 Pulse combines information from your chats, your feedback, and connected apps to deliver a focus set of updates designed to make your life easier. That might mean following up on a project, suggesting resources to advance a long-term goal, or reminding you about an upcoming commitment. Personally, Pulse has already helped me discover new emerging treatments for my health condition, recommend new painting techniques for my art practice, surface great weekend events for my family and more. All right. So on the one hand, they are explicitly in all of these announcements, indicating that this is both for work and for life. You keep hearing this phrase, help you reach your goals. At the same time, it felt kind of inevitable to me that mostly this was going to be

Starting point is 00:03:19 about, one, curating news around people's interests, and two, making contextual recommendations for things like restaurants, travel, events. And certainly when you looked at the Open AI staffers who talked about their early experiences with Pulse, a lot of it was restaurant discovery or events or just interest aggregation. And so here was the issue for me going in. First of all, I am long on record as saying I just do not believe in and am not interested in personally any of the sort of restaurant, local events, real world recommendation style features of these assistants.

Starting point is 00:03:54 I do not believe that that set of functionality is sufficiently useful to justify agents and AI. I just don't think that discovering those things is enough of a problem that it justifies a whole new paradigm. Now, perhaps if that comes along with other stuff, fine, and I'm also very willing to recognize that my personal preferences here may not be the mass, but I cringe every time I see a new agent platform, demo themselves by booking a flight or making a restaurant reservation. And so when people are finding family events as the main benefit of this thing, my eyes start to glaze over. The second thing is, it does feel like Pulse can do a great job for lots of people around information curation, around their interest in their professional pursuits.

Starting point is 00:04:31 The problem with that use case for me is that in many ways I am the human that for all of you. I spend literally hours every day reading not just what is interesting but every single possible thing about AI so that I can filter and curate and synthesize what I think is most important. Now that's not Pulse's fault and I actually think that that feature can be super useful for a lot of people. I just knew that it wasn't going to be useful for me. In fact, one of the first things I had to do was make sure to instruct Pulse to never, ever try to share news about AI or related topics with me because it was just going to be a waste of space. All of this led to my starting position with Pulse, which was that while I thought it would be great for a ton of people, in fact, maybe for the average

Starting point is 00:05:12 person, I didn't think it was going to be great for me. But I wanted to try it because in general, I found that I seemed to get a lot out of chat GPT as a business tool that other people don't. just in terms of how I use regular chat GPT. I use it, yes, for a ton of obvious stuff for helping write ad copy, comparing YouTube thumbnails, comparing post titles. I use it for document review, translation, all the normal stuff that people use chat GPT for. But then what's a little bit different is that I use it extremely deeply from a strategic

Starting point is 00:05:43 perspective. And I've done this ever since 03 came out. The jump between 01 and 03 was where this use case was really unlocked, where I spent a meaningful amount of time pretty much every day, talking through and sifting through my own ideas, strategies for the future, for both the podcast and surrounding media endeavors, as well as for super intelligent. And what I really wanted to try to see was whether I could tune pulse to actually support that type of behavior, to basically surface every day a set of interesting strategic thoughts, basically continuing our conversation in between the times that I was actually prompting it

Starting point is 00:06:17 about something specific. I spent a bunch of time at the beginning, really, dialing it in to make sure I got less of what I didn't want and more of what I did want. And initially, it did pretty well. In the first few days, I got some ideas for new product offerings. I got some review and reflection on positioning for super intelligent and how we can head into 2026 owning the idea of AI planning as a platform. And it also picked up on some discussions that I have been having around extension products for the daily brief in ways that were valuable. So when one of the articles on Pulse is something valuable, you can save it and it just becomes a part of your chat. And so you can see here this example where one of the things that I'm

Starting point is 00:06:52 considering for the Daily Brief Preview Alert, because this isn't something I've announced or even actually decided if I'm for sure doing. But TLDR, I think there's an interesting gap between information and entertainment on the one hand, which is, of course, what the podcast does now, and full on learning and upskilling on the other. I think there's a big space between them. And in that gap, there's a lot of opportunity to take informational or educational type content, tweak it a little bit to make it more useful and practical for upskilling without it being all the way into the realm of coursework and training. The idea that I've been discussing is the idea of an enterprise edition, which basically would take the show that we have as it is now, and optimize it for cross-organizational

Starting point is 00:07:30 usage. So what you can see here is ChatchipT Pulse trying to take it and position and package it a little tighter. The positioning, it says AIDB Enterprise Edition, your org's daily AI learning layer. It operationalizes AI literacy and decision-making with lightweight routines embedded in Slack and teams, email and recurring meetings, so busy teams absorb what matters and act on it. The core bundle from a product perspective, a daily operators cut, which is a one-pager with three to five takeaways, roll-by-roll actions and discussion prompts, a two-minute daily audio cutdown, basically taking the show and compressing it for people who are really busy, a weekly team briefing that has what the implications of the top stories are, broader discussion points,

Starting point is 00:08:07 etc. And then it even had a bunch of expansion pack ideas as well as how to suggest ROI, pricing, distribution ideas, et cetera. So this is valuable. This is something that I'm actually actively thinking about. And like I said, in the first few days, I was able to get some of this style of thing out of here, which wasn't necessarily totally novel, but like I said, it did extend what we had been talking about. I also have been fairly successful in getting it to suggest totally novel products or offerings. While the hit rate on those is obviously going to be lower, that is still something that I think is interesting to basically have a constant ongoing overnight idea generator, where I can quickly reject an idea or save it for later with the little bookmarking tool that

Starting point is 00:08:47 puts it into the normal chats. However, I started to run into a set of very consistent issues which have really limited my ability to use it for these purposes. The first will call context creep. So like I said at the beginning, in addition to my primary or most valued use case, which is all of this strategic stuff, I do use chat GPT for a ton of other things. And unfortunately, Pulse doesn't know which of the things that I'm using chat GBT for are more important or less important to me. On any given day then, it's going to have a whole bunch of stuff that I absolutely under no circumstances want it to use as fodder for Pulse. Every day, for example, I'm using it to write descriptions and titles for podcasts. I'm using it to compare YouTube thumbnails. I'm sometimes asking it about topics and how to frame things for the show.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And there are often very sort of basic mechanical things too. For example, the other day I was trying to figure out how Spotify subscriptions work and whether there was a way to add an ad-free version of an episode or whether I needed to publish each episode individually as its own thing and then mark it as only for the subscription. And the next morning in Pulse, the top four articles were all about Spotify subscription, and optimization strategy, and it's just stuff that I had absolutely no interest in being there. But again, Pulse had no idea how to differentiate which things mattered most to me.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Now, yes, theoretically, it is steerable, and I had some success in reminding it not to discuss things like thumbnails or YouTube or Spotify optimization, but it still has every day a ton of that style of stuff creep in. And so until I'm really able to almost rank prioritize which of my use cases for chat GPT matter, if it's drawing from all of it, there's going to be some amount of this context creep. The next problem that it has, which is sometimes a more broad problem of chat GPT and an imperfection of the memory system right now, is context confusion. The big context that chatchipt gets confused at with me is, of course, where the lines between super intelligent and AI Daily Brief are. Many times when I'm talking about a novel product, as clear as I try to be

Starting point is 00:10:47 that it is something that I'm thinking about in the AI Daily Brief context or the superintelligent context, it ends up blurring them together. And this problem seems to be worse in the context of pulse. It would frequently blend two different conversations together into one or in another circumstance, extract details from one type of conversation, and plant it in another where it had no business. So, for example, it situated the product that I was exploring in the right way, but pulled pricing discussions that we had had from something totally different from a different domain. Now, like I said, this is me rubbing up against the limits of the memory architecture right now, and I assume that this will get better over time, but this sort of context confusion seems to be amplified,

Starting point is 00:11:24 like I said, in the context of proactivity versus reactivity. The last common problem, which is really the big one over the last few days, was what I'll call the nothing left to say problem. There are only so many times it can rehash and repurpose and try to extend strategic conversations we've already had. It turns out that many of those things really require me to give new inputs and provide new direction in the way that I'm thinking about them for those conversations to be relevant. And so where I was consuming almost all of the content over the weekend and the beginning of the week, by the middle of the week, I was just giving it a glance in finding much, much less relevant. And even when it was bringing back up relevant strategic conversations,

Starting point is 00:12:02 a lot of it kind of just got repetitive. Which brings me back to this assertion that AI should do more than just answer questions, that it should anticipate your needs and help you reach your goals. The verdict on that continues to be out for me. I am not unsatisfied. at all with chatGBT as a strategic partner. To the extent that I am, it's about things like that memory paradigm, not how proactive versus reactive it is. In fact, what I found all week was that for it to be useful in this context, it really required me to be continually inputting new questions, new thoughts, new explorations. The point is, for my strategic use case, I do not need chatGBT to be proactive. I do not need it to be ambient. I worry, frankly, for OpenAI, that this assumption

Starting point is 00:12:50 that it should anticipate your needs is a little bit of old world web 2.0 attention capture logic seeping in. Does AI really need to anticipate your needs? Or if it did anticipate your needs, would that just be a better way to get people to return to it? Now, obviously, the people who are building ChatGPT want people to use the product. And for the first time ever, tech companies are having to ask, is there enough that's enough? Might we not want the attention battle to be totally zero sum? But these are big ongoing questions and they will not be answered just in the context of this show. So as for a grade, I'm going to give it a B minus. I went in being very skeptical that it was going to be something that I would habituate. Where I find myself a week later

Starting point is 00:13:33 is that a lot of that skepticism has been validated, although not necessarily for the reasons that I would have thought, and frankly, for some reasons that are potentially fixable through some combination of product and model development, as well as my own personal tinkering. I find it interesting enough that I imagine that I will probably on most days open it up to give it at least a quick skim, flag the pieces that are relevant for me and come back to them later, and that might be enough. In other words, Pulse might not need 100% consumption where I sit down for 20 minutes and read every word for it to be a useful feature. I do think more broadly, there is this theme in question of what the big game is for all of these products.

Starting point is 00:14:09 I really, really, if you are at OpenAI and you are listening, I would so strongly encourage your communications team and your leadership specifically articulate your vision for how these attention consumptive experiences all add up to part of the master plan between Pulse, which feels so much to people like a vehicle for ads, the SORA app, which we're about to talk about, there is a new narrative that the new guy is turning into the old guy, and all it cares about is keeping our rapt attention for the sake of ad dollars. It strikes me that that is probably a reductive way to look at things. Sam Altman seems to have indicated as much, but if that is not the case, communicate it, and let people know how it all ladders up to something bigger.

Starting point is 00:14:52 So that's chat cheap ETT-Pulse, but there were, of course, a bunch of other interesting products released this week. I'm not going to have number grades for them, but the two that I want to talk about our Sora 2 and Imagine from Claude. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent. Now, one thing that we are having a lot of conversations with folks about is the fact that for some of you, your fiscal year is coming to an end, and that means two things. One, it means planning and thinking about what you're going to do in the next year, and two, it means using up those last of budgets so you don't lose them.

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Starting point is 00:18:29 AI native. That's BLITZY.com. Talking first about SORA, by which I really mean SORA 2, the model and Sora the application, I'm not going to rehash the endless debates around short-form video content and whether Open AI should be doing this at all. I'm just going to look at it on its own terms. So first of all, let's talk about the things that people are doing with it. It is still very much in the exploration phase. The endless videos of Sam Altman from the first 24 hours have thankfully dissipated, but there are still a few common trends that you see over and over again.

Starting point is 00:19:04 We're getting, for example, a lot of Pokemon and Pikachu. Bob Ross and Dead celebrities are kind of everywhere. There are a bunch of historical remakes. I'm seeing MLK, JFK speeches remade. There are a lot of animals driving cars. and getting pulled over. So what have I been playing around with? Well, there are three, I think, big themes. Nostalgia and historic generations. Seasonal content, it is October after all. My favorite combination of those is this one. I got Anthropic. Let's team up. This Halloween, every happy meal

Starting point is 00:19:40 comes with one of three AI pals. By the way, part of why I think people are attracted to the nostalgia stuff is that in addition to that just being kind of where we are right now as a society, it also makes it easier for the model to perform well. If you go for something nostalgic, there's a higher chance in other words that the model output is going to match roughly the vibe or the emotion that you were trying to match. By and large, so far, SORA has been pretty much fun and playful rather than people thinking about the business use cases of it. But for kicks, I did start to experiment with could you do micro-explaners using some of these same ideas. So here's, for example, one about context engineering. Hey, future thinker. Ever wonder what makes AI answers smart and not just

Starting point is 00:20:19 lucky? It's all about context engineering. Context is the who, what, where, and when that surrounds your data. In the search for thinking machines, researchers are turning to a method inspired by life itself, reinforcement learning. A system tries, fails, and tries again. But what about the cameo feature that was such a big part of the pitch, where you could put yourself in videos or allow other people to put you in videos? The jury's still out here. Certainly people have been playing around with it a bit. But at least for me right now, it feels like either novelty or or I just don't have the social density for it to be a real mode of interaction. Honestly, I kind of get the feeling that we need to get this app in the hands of the youths

Starting point is 00:20:57 as fast as humanly possible to understand if it's actually going to be a thing. I can totally see the ability to put you and your friends in videos as being so different and so fun that it actually does end up justifying its own digital space. But to some extent, that'll be the big question when it comes to SORA app longevity. Still for now, the thing is number three in the app store. And so at least for now, interest remains high. And by the way, for those of you who are interested in some of the business use cases of SORA, count on Greg Eisenberg to always have a fast list of where money can be made.

Starting point is 00:21:28 Some of his thoughts, he thinks that someone will buy a synthetic SORA 2 account for $10 million, and it'll be a good deal but look crazy. He thinks that whoever builds the no AI Instagram will make a bajillion dollars because people are going to get sick of SORA spam. He thinks that people are going to start selling their own likeness, that someone's going to build a daily SORA channel and then flip it into a startup, and so on and so forth. Now, the last product I wanted to talk about is the one that is the least mature and potentially

Starting point is 00:21:52 the long-term most disruptive. That product is Imagine with Claude, something that Anthropic is calling simply a temporary research preview. Imagine is basically an experience where Claude generates software on the fly. They write no functionality is predetermined, no code is pre-written. What you see is Claude creating in real time, responding and adapting to your request as you interact. And Imagine is restricted to Anthropics' highest tier, so there's a very small handful of people who have it, but the results so far are pretty impressive. In a lot of ways, what it's showing is Sonnet 4.5's ability to create user interfaces. Let's do a couple of live examples. Here's one of their suggestions, make a time machine control panel. Let's click it and we'll

Starting point is 00:22:30 actually watch this in real time. I'll have my editors not fast forward this. You can see it working, and it's generating it in real time. So as opposed to a vibe coding tool like lovable, where you give it your prompt and then it figures it out and writes it, this is all happening in real time and is actually interactable at the moment that you're first seeing it. Now, obviously, this is just an interface. It doesn't have a back end, at least not fully, so there are limits to what you can do.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And this is where the research preview aspect of this comes in, but it's still pretty cool. One of the experiments that I like doing when it comes to these types of experiences is design a version of 1990s black and green. Oregon Trail, but with lovecraft themes called Eldritch Trail. I like this because it's a distinct experience that it can pull back on with a distinct reframing that gives you an easy ability to see how well it does. For any of you that grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, you will recognize that we are

Starting point is 00:23:36 in the right visual zone. The years 1926 and you're leading an expedition from Arkham. And what's cool about this, I did this experiment before, is that this. is actually interactable, the next part of the experience after we click. So first up, we're selecting a profession, which is always what you did first in Oregon Trail. Obviously, we have to be an occultist. So we click that and let's see what happens next. So you can see it's actually building the game as we experience it. And this is really what got me thinking about how different this is going to be. I've thought a lot about the implications of AI being able to generate experiences more quickly

Starting point is 00:24:14 that you could then interact with. The idea of it being able to do it in real time and generate as an interactive experience is a whole different paradigm. And one of the interesting implications is what it means for the state of software development. Ever since the rise of vibe coding, it has become a big question again as to whether these coding platforms are going to negate the need for enterprise software in the future. And while there are lots of reasons to think that companies are still going to want best in class, stable, highly secure software, and the world of SaaS isn't all of a sudden coming to an apocalyptic end, this certainly does open up some new implications of how perhaps smaller groups within an organization create applications that do things for

Starting point is 00:24:54 themselves, and if nothing else, Anthropic is clearly thinking in these terms. I noticed a piece in the information this week called Anthropic says its AI can clone enterprise apps like Slack. They write, when AI coding tools came into vogue, chief information officers salivated at the idea of using them to develop their own versions of Salesforce and Slack and stop paying a fortune for enterprise apps. But the AI wasn't accurate or consistent. persistent enough to do that. Now Anthropic is reawakening these app replacement dreams. This came from a live conversation with the information, but after seeing what we just saw with Imagine and this live generation of a game experience and software on the fly, it certainly feels like I at least have to

Starting point is 00:25:31 reevaluate my priors when it comes to those possibilities. When push comes to shove, it feels like although it is the least refined, the least complete, and at least in the moment least practical of these new experiences that were launched this week, or imagine from Quad is the one that I'm watching most closely. Still, from the sheer standpoint of new toys to play with and new experiments to tinker with, it has been a very good couple of weeks. An open AI dev day is coming on Monday, meaning that we're likely to get even more soon. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Appreciate you listening or watching, as always. And until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - I Tested ChatGPT As My Cofounder for a Week - Here's Everything I Learned

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